SOURCE: Spargo, John. “The Working Child.” In The Bitter Cry of the Children, pp. 125-217. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968.

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1906, Spargo explores the physical, moral, social, and economic implications of child labor in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

“In this boasted land of freedom there are bonded baby slaves, And the busy world goes by and does not heed. They are driven to the mill, just to glut and overfill Bursting coffers of the mighty monarch, Greed. When they perish we are told it is God's will, Oh, the roaring of the mill, of the mill!” 

—Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

I

It is a startling and suggestive fact that the very force which Aristotle, the profoundest thinker of antiquity, regarded as the only agency through which the abolition of slavery might be made possible, served, when at last...